WHAM! Gabby and I are standing in the hallway in our home, talking. It’s evening, about the time both of our girls should be in bed. We’re talking about something, about what, I can’t recall. We’re carrying on our conversation in front of Gracie’s bedroom door. It’s dark, so we don’t see or hear her approach her door. Gracie grabs the edge of her door and slams it shut. Neither Gabby or I flinch, as we’ve gotten used to such occurrences. I remember this particular incident for some reason, which occurred earlier this year, and only write about it now because Gracie has slammed her door shut for the 2nd time tonight. “I hate it when she does that,” Kristine mutters under breath.

I am going to fix that cursed door, someday. After I fix the holes she knocked into some of our walls. I already replaced the chintzy toilet seat in the girls’ bathroom (a dark, humorous reference to a post from another day), and I placed some sort of stopper on the wall to keep the doorknob from going through Gracie’s bedroom wall.

How she created the hole in her bedroom wall, I’ve some idea. We think she fell and put a knee into the wall, because of a commotion we heard, Gracie crying, and a subsequent swelling of her left knee. It’s easy to imagine her falling, what, with all the spinning she does while upright. What’s surprising is that she doesn’t trip over herself more often.

You should see people jump, whenever we have guests in our home and Gracie decides to wake them up. My sister-in-law practically jumps out of her skin when she’s settled in for the evening, relaxing, watching TV, talking with us. I laugh to myself when I imagine my sister-in-law nearly having a heart attack at the violent sound of a door slamming shut.

One particular, fine day Gracie was in a door slamming frenzy. I wanted to take the cursed door off its hinges and store the thing in our garage. Only Kristine wouldn’t let me do it. So now I daydream of various schemes to defeat Gracie’s door slamming.